SPI 119: What Is the “Minimum Marketable Event?” (And How Did LeadPages Use It To Go from Zero to 25K Customers in Less Than Two Years?)

By Pat Flynn on July 24, 2014

Clay Collins, founder of LeadPages (a company that I’m an advisor for), was our featured guest in Session 78 of The SPI Podcast.

That episode has over 760 comments, and is my second most downloaded interview of all time. More importantly, it seems to be the episode that most people talk about when I ask them what their favorite episode is.

I always follow up with “Why?”, and the reasons are usually the same:

It has the most actionable content.

Clay brought so many useful tips and strategies for building an audience and increasing email conversions, I get messages each week from people who have put those tips into action and share their results with me. In fact, I just checked the comment section of that episode…

The awesome thing about Clay’s strategies are that they aren’t made up from thin air. He and his company have a billion (yes, a billion) data points in their analytics, and their tool across all websites are collecting over 4,000,000 opt-ins per month. Because they keep track of all of that, he knows what’s strategies and principles are working, and what strategies and principles are really working.

In this episode, we recap a couple of the strategies that were talked about the last time (namely the ones I’ve implemented myself and the results), and we also get into some launch strategies as well, which were very interesting because he talked about things I’ve never heard of before, including something called the minimum marketable event.

Also, don’t miss the huge giveaway mentioned in this episode (more information below), as well as a tremendous opportunity for you to get some direct feedback and education from Clay and his team.

Clay’s Monster LeadPages Giveaway (and Exercise)

A 2-Year LeadPagesEnterprise membership costs $1000.00. Clay is giving away two of them for free.

As mentioned in this episode (at the 29:04 mark), you can enter to win by doing the following:

The idea here is to get you to think about how you could create a unique lead magnet or giveaway for a unique blog post (or podcast or video) that you already have on your own site. Site-wide giveaways are great (similar to how I give away eBooks the Smart Way at the end of each and every post), but a unique giveaway that is relevant to a single piece of content you have can perform much better.

I found this to be the case when I experimented with this tactic in the middle of this podcast episode here. The conversion rate on that particular giveaway, since it’s relevant to that particular show’s topic (email management and productivity), is much higher than normal.

So here’s all you have to do to enter…

In the comment section of this post:

Pick an existing piece of content on your site. Preferably, it’s one of your more popular pieces. Paste the link to that article in your comment.

Along with that link, think of a unique giveaway or lead magnet that you could create just for that one piece of content. You don’t have to actually create or build it (although hopefully you will later), but give it some good thought as if you were going to create it. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, Clay and I brainstorm various types of giveaway ideas at the 26:30 mark of this episode. Describe what this giveaway is in your comment.

Create the headline for your giveaway. This is the copy that you would use next to your opt-in form to get people to subscribe and get your giveaway.

And that’s it. Clay and I each will pick one winner. You have until 11:59:59pm PST on Thursday, August 7th to enter, and winners will be notified by email.

Beyond the giveaway, Clay and a few members of his copywriting team will periodically come into the comment section within the contest period to reply to your comment and help you re-craft or re-write your headline. How awesome is that!!

To allow Clay’s team to better help you, in addition to the 3 steps above, you may benefit from sharing a sentence or two about why you chose that particular giveaway.

Thank You Clay!

If you enjoyed this session of the SPI Podcast, let Clay know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out on Twitter:

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Thanks patt for sharing this nice content, I will try to practice it in my http://grinderify.com website.

Jeannie Hill

I like your suggestion, Will. It is amazing what a great title can do. Everyone loves proven success.

Arnold

Hello Pat and Clay,

I know it’s way too late to enter the competition, but I’m here not for it. I wanted to share my LEAD MAGNET and if, by any chance, you managed to stumble back on this page, I will wait for your response. Thanks in advance.

My headline specifically is “Grab your Tenerife travel map with all the destinations and attractions easily marked and ready for printing out for free. Or store it as a digital version on your mobile phone or tablet and access all the points of interest with a single click.”.

I know it’s quite a long headline, but it explains what user will get with a suggestion of how one may use it. It would be great to know what you think about it. Is it too long? Does it not stand out?

Once the user clicked on it, the popup appears asking user to enter their first name and email address. Once that’s done, user is redirected to the thank you page and the email with the PDF file to the resource itself is sent out.

I added these lead magnet headlines about 5 times in the whole article, not too far from each other, but also not too close.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks for what you do, it’s great.